


Last Hand

by syailendra



Series: Play-by-Play [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Missing Scene, Spoilers for The Magnus Archives Season 4, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25949815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syailendra/pseuds/syailendra
Summary: Excerpts from the last divorce and marriage of Peter Lukas.This is how you end a long game with a short engagement. This is how you win a bet you lose.
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas, Peter Lukas/Jonah Magnus
Series: Play-by-Play [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890547
Comments: 8
Kudos: 63





	Last Hand

**Author's Note:**

> made some heavy edits so that this would work with the other fic!! hehe

_“Without the lighted window in the distance, how am I to see myself apart from it?”_

_\- Peter Lukas, MAG159 - #0182509-B: The Last_

* * *

People who knew Peter—Simon, Elias, the list was not long, naturally—often accused him of being a terrible listener. He was the opposite of Elias, who could put his chin on one manicured hand, look at you, and incite in you a deep and terrible need to speak of your darkest secrets in the (false) hope that it might bring you some relief. Peter, on the other hand, kept talk small. When he spoke, he aimed not to make too deep of an impression. When people spoke to him, they gave nothing away.

Peter made an exception for war stories. He dug deep whenever he spoke to retired soldiers or former mercenaries. Few things isolated people like returning from the realm of the Slaughter to normal streets with such normal people walking through them. Their former sweethearts have married other flames. Their friends were dead or far away. They tried to speak of the horrors of the battlefield, only to discover that words like _slick_ or _red_ or _wet_ did no justice to the way blood was capable of soaking the soil and the mind.

War stories inevitably gave way, mid-drink, to stories of divorces, alienated children, and former friends who no longer recognized the haunted shells left behind by the people they’d once known. These stories turned Peter into a good listener. He would nod, utter a few words of encouragement, and offer his new acquaintance another strong drink. 

These survivors always wondered, _what was it all for?_ What could have been so important? What could have merited such atrocities, committed both against the opponent and the self? Was there any cause that could justify such thorough destruction of your own soul?

Some of them have spun answers for themselves. Justice. Glory. Faith. Peter drank his fill in the fog that surrounded these words, because now that the survivor had imbued them with such terrible stories, they could no longer be uttered to other people. Those who had not been at war would never be able to understand. Their motivations seemed like mutilated versions of universally-understood ideas.

There was one woman who had gone to war for her girlfriend. Peter had met her in Cape Town. She refused to join the crew of the _Tundra_ , but she did take up his offer to buy her a drink.

“She said she’d marry me if I got back,” Lieutenant Crane said before knocking back another shot of terrible vodka. “I cut my leg off to get out of a trap for her. I charged under artillery fire for her.” Another shot. “Marina. Fucking. Winters.”

For her trouble, Lieutenant Crane received a prosthetic leg, severe PTSD, several medals, and—when she got home—an invitation to the wedding of Marina Winters and Kimberly Yamamoto. She’d come in her best dress, looking so beautiful she knew Marina’s eyes could not stop following her from behind the veil. Then she’d gotten so shamefully drunk she had to be thrown out.

Some people could not talk about justice, glory, or faith without also talking about war. Lieutenant Crane could not talk about love.

It was just a coincidence that the _Tundra’_ s next destination was London, really.

A servant of The Lonely had a very simple pilgrimage route. The pilgrimage itself was exceedingly simple too: he would go to Elias; Elias would pull out every bribe and threat and promise to attempt to keep Peter in London, the city he knew like the back of his hand; Peter would propose a wager to settle the matter.

If Peter won, he would return to the sea. If Elias won, Peter would stay.

The _Tundra_ always returned to the sea.

* * *

Loneliness took two forms. 

The first form was the natural consequence of separation from others, the way water got darker the further away from the sun you sank. This first form didn’t even require too much upkeep. All you had to do was drift.

The second form, however, required care and conscientiousness. A gardener would liken it to the trimming, pruning, and wiring of a _bonsai_ tree, or adding color to the water surrounding the stem of a white carnation. This was the kind of loneliness you could only cultivate by warping the things that seemed to oppose it beyond any hope of recognition.

If you really worked on honing this skill, you could grow so much: a cypress tree no larger than a house cat, milky petals tinged with blue and red, love that made you feel like the only parts of two people that could ever touch each other were limbs and lips and skin.

* * *

Most things could be oversimplified; the chronicle of Peter’s marriages was no exception. If you wanted the complete story of ~~Jonah Magnus~~ ~~James Wright~~ Elias Bouchard and Peter Lukas, you would need a few paper-bound volumes, each holding a few hundred pages. You would have to look through several different sets of divorce papers and the marriage certificates they corresponded to. There were no pictures, though; Peter hated having pictures taken of him. If you asked Simon, he would lay out the big picture very plainly. Here were the things Simon would say:

  1. Peter believed in privacy. A _lot_ of privacy.
  2. Elias did not believe in privacy at all.



Which was to say, when Peter had left his family to their devices after Naomi Herne had arrived at Moorland House, Elias had asked Peter why Peter was still alive, if love was so fatal to Lukases. All of a sudden, Peter’s gigantic bedroom felt like it was too small; there were two doors but no exits. Peter chose to kiss Elias, glad to know that he could do that instead.

Having sex with Elias was an act of worship for both of them—the Lonely was fed by the ache Peter felt when Elias touched him, looking to dissect and devour; the Eye by the thousand little things you could learn from a man by pushing him to the heights of pleasure—but the soft minutes after made for even better offerings.

The brilliance of it all was that Peter didn’t even have to try. He would remember the way he and his mother had nodded at each other from opposite sides of Evan’s coffin. It felt about the same as nodding to a teller on your way out of the bank. 

The thread of memory would spill over into the large, empty rooms of his childhood, the silent hallways, the tinkling of cutlery ringing out during meals. Peter remembered the one time he’d allowed Evan to play-act in front of him, and Evan had made him laugh. It was then that Elias looked at him from under heavy eyelids with a compelling power that had nothing to do with the Eye.

Peter opened his mouth to speak. Out came story after story about his time on the _Tundra._ Out came a silly crack about Elias’s employees. He laughed a little—it might have been an intimate sound in any other bedroom. Elias got up, announcing that he should start driving now if he wanted to make it back to London before sunrise, and Peter felt the chill of the space between icebergs. It was everywhere—in Elias’s voice, in the air next to Peter where Elias’s body had been just seconds before, in every fiber woven into the sheets that had witnessed them. 

If Elias had decided to simply reach into Peter’s mind and Know, he would understand that it wasn’t the love of one woman that had killed Evan. Peter had long learned that this was not necessary to feed Elias’s patron. 

When Elias had asked him whether the people on the other side of the room were his parents, and why he was still alive—when Elias had looked at him under the veil of the moonlight and Peter had, for a moment, felt the urge to talk about the woman who had given birth to him and the nephew he did not grieve for, his heart had pumped burning ice through his veins with such fierce resistance that the Eye had gotten all it wanted to take from Peter Lukas.

Sometimes Peter wondered whether Elias was so insistent on asking Peter about himself because he knew the terrible pain of answering would be such a potent gift for The Eye. It was a comforting thought, one that made it so easy for him to step back on the deck of the _Tundra_ , sailing away into the biting winds with his crew, who joked and drank and sang and asked no questions of any real import. 

This time, Elias sent physical copies of the divorce papers all the way to Iceland. Peter signed them together with the rest of the contracts Dahl handed to him. Gave them the same amount of thought, too.

Floating on the open ocean, too far away from anyone’s home to really even fully believe in the concept, Peter wasn’t nearly as close to The Lonely as he was when he held Elias in his arms, in the bedroom where he grew up, in the house that had made him.

* * *

“We’re receivin’ letters, Captain,” Dahl told him as they were leaving the Black Sea. “They contain… names. An’ pictures. I’ve been keepin’ them, since I know you won’t want to read them, but I figured you should know.”

“They contain names and pictures of the crew?” Peter asked, and Dahl nodded. He was so angry he couldn’t help but smile a little. A jealous fucker, was Elias Bouchard, and he never let you forget it. When it came to these things he was perfectly happy to use the power of the Eye.

“Getting a little creative these days, aren’t we,” he muttered to himself. To Dahl, he said, “Chart a course to London.”

The next letter that came to the _Tundra_ —Forsaken knows how, as Peter had long given up on understanding how Elias did the things he did—contained no names or photos of members of the crew. Elias had outlined the terms of a wager. 

The Institute. The servants of the Eye. Panopticon. Everything Elias had ever marked, without Elias himself; the winnings would make his family very proud, if they still remembered him as more than a name on the tapestry hanging in Moorland House.

“How long’s our leave, Captain?” Dahl had asked him once they’d arrived in London.

“For as long as I’m here,” Peter growled. Dahl knew not to probe further.

This was a simple enough explanation for how he found himself back in the familiar heart of the Magnus Institute, with Elias chattering on and on about the state of it these days—he spoke of Jonathan Sims, the Unknowing, and beating Jurgen Leitner to death with a pipe, which amused Peter greatly. He wore a sleek dark waistcoat with subtly shimmering pinstripes over a perfectly-ironed shirt. It went well with the scowl that appeared on his face every time Peter had to ask whom Elias was talking about whenever he started to tell a story.

He didn’t keep track of Elias’s employees. This upset Elias, since he had to recount the entire Institute’s _dramatis personae_ every time he wanted to talk about them. He said it was boring. He seemed to do it with relish every time anyway.

“Martin—er, Blackwood, the one with the bad poetry—is in love with the Archivist.” 

Peter sighed. 

“Elias, If you wanted someone to gossip about your employees with, you could have called Simon.” 

“Simon’s a bore. For all your faults, you do have a better sense of humor.” Peter smiled at him. Elias rolled his eyes. “Anyway, could you imagine that? Being in love with the Archivist? The poor boy—reviled by his mother, had to lie on his CV to get a job, treated with contempt by most of his colleagues, and, to top it all off, he’s  _ in love with the Archivist. _ Are you sure you haven’t misplaced a brother or cousin somewhere?” 

“...Ah,” Peter said. Elias, commenting on someone else’s fixation with the current Archivist. It would be funny if it didn’t make Peter want to take the chain of an anchor and wind them around the Archivist’s neck, so that it would strangle him before he could even drown in the sea.

Elias looked at him from where he was pouring them both two glasses of whiskey, a glint in his eye. “Getting ideas, are we?” 

“You say things like that and expect me not to take the bait? One would think you didn’t know me.” 

“Apt metaphor. I do love our little games.” Elias slid into Peter’s lap, handing over one glass. His smooth trousers were good for something, at least. “I did make an offer in my last letter, no?” 

“What, are you offering me the chance to go for Martin Blackwood? Come now, Elias. Look at him.” 

“You’re the expert on loneliness. I’ll take your word for it.” 

“And if, somehow, you won this one? What would you want?”

“I want you to mark the Archivist,” Elias said. “Take him into The Lonely. Allow him to find his way back out. Quite simple, I think. You can even toy with him while he’s in there, if it suits your fancy. He’s only missing the mark of Forsaken.”

“This again.”

Those were the good times, when Peter would allow himself to lie next to Elias and listen to his theories. When Elias would ask Peter to take Gertrude Robinson into the fog and Peter would say no. Laughing, Elias had once asked whether Peter was afraid that Gertrude would blow up The Lonely. Peter thought about it. Maybe I just want to deny you something. Elias had sighed, muttering something about expressions of affection, and turned away to sleep. The good times.

“Just because you’d failed so miserably, Peter, doesn’t mean everybody else will.” Cheap shots today. Never mind the fact that Elias had as many failures under his belt as Peter did; Gertrude Robinson had not even been born yet when his own ritual had failed to fulfill its purpose. “Since you have a track record of being uncooperative—”

“Really, does that surprise you, given what you’re asking—”

“—I thought you might be more inclined to give it a chance if you had something to gain from it as well.” 

“Something to gain, you say,” Peter whispered against the shell of Elias’s ear, closing his eyes so he could be more aware of the shiver that passed from Elias’s skin to his. “While you have everything to lose. Yes, this suits me quite well. I can leave a door open, but I can’t promise that he’ll make it back out.”

“I would rather you didn’t, actually. We both know how you are with promises.”

They kissed perfunctorily, like two children dipping their toes to check the temperature of a familiar lake. Cold as ever. Still too deep and too vast and incredibly terrifying in ways neither of them liked. 

“You do know what he’ll have to do if you want Blackwood to be able to operate the Panopticon,” Elias murmured, and Peter opened his eyes, wondered if Elias ever looked at them and saw Mordechai, Tobias, the rest. Some genetic joke had blessed the entire line with remarkably similar eyes. Peter had played another joke on himself by noticing.

“Of course. Do you have any requests?”

“For Martin? No, no, of course not. For you? Yes. I want you to watch as he does it. Until he finishes the job. Don’t you  _ dare _ look away.”

_ I couldn’t if I wanted to, _ Peter thought, but Elias was bending his head to kiss him again, properly this time, so they could put all thoughts of conversation away. Here, with the dim lights of the office spilling clouded gold over Elias’s skin, the scent of sweat marking them both as more human than anything else, there was nothing but worship. Two gods, two monsters. Not much more.

* * *

He had confirmed Martin Blackwood’s readiness. He had a nearly-completed map of the tunnels below the Institute. Peter stood in the office that was his but wasn’t, flicking through the blood-soaked pages of _The Seven Lamps of Architecture._

He thought of Elias’s hands closing over metal. Swinging motions, sounds of things breaking, flesh giving in—hallmarks of the kind of destructive drive that craved contact, not distance. The end times might have given that to Elias, but Peter had not changed. Martin Blackwood would be the one to thrust the knife into Jonah Magnus’s body. You could almost fool yourself into thinking Peter and Elias had nothing to do with the whole affair, if you thought of it that way.

There was just one thing left to do.

Elias’s incredibly lavish cell had gained a sculpture Peter couldn’t make heads or tails of. (It was probably something Elias found pleasing to the eye. Peter did not understand art, as a matter of principle.) This was the only new addition Peter could see. The rest of the cell had remained unchanged since the last time he’d been there. Instead of a standard-issue cot, Elias had secured a soft mattress for himself, wrapped in the maroon sheets he liked so much. One of his antique lamps lit the place with a warm, tasteful glow. There were potted plants. Peter had noted that the prison staff seemed unusually high-strung.

Elias himself was sprawled on the mattress in silk pajamas, leafing through a book. It reminded Peter of the time when they still had a house together, the first time they’d been married. Peter used to relish the feeling of coming home to Elias and leaving again; the ragged and gaping emptiness of longing had been too delightful to resist. This was back when Elias’s attempts to figure him out had been more endearing than annoying or terrifying, when Peter had made more of an effort to look like he was listening when Elias told him about the Institute and the state of the world. This was back when they had been so sweet Peter thought he was going to die of it.

“Yes,” Elias said without looking up from his book.

“Oh, come on, at least allow me to pop the question.”

Elias closed _Crime and Punishment,_ placed it on the oak bedside table, and crossed his arms.

“Fine. Let’s hear it.”

Peter walked towards him then kneeled by the side of the bed. He raised one eyebrow. Elias sighed, turning and sitting up so that they were facing each other.

“Elias Bouchard,” Peter said, “will you marry me?”

Now Elias was looking at him, half-lidded and languid, reaching down to trace Peter’s jaw and cup his chin in one hand. 

A memory filled Peter like the bloom of sunlight in shallow waters. Peter had brought Elias on board the _Tundra_ exactly once, introducing him to no one in the crew. This wasn’t long after they’d met Simon Fairchild, not long before Peter would ask Elias to marry him for the very first time; Elias had only been Elias for a short time, but already the name felt more familiar on Peter’s tongue than _James._ (Peter had never called him Jonah.)

“Only five percent of the sea has been explored by humans,” he’d said, his voice as muted as the sound of fluttering blinds, cutting through the howling of the air over the Atlantic. “They could ask me about the other ninety-five percent, if only they knew about me.”

Peter joined him. A shroud of cold light fell over Elias. He looked like he belonged in the fog—like he would so stubbornly insist that he knew his way, and go even deeper in the process. Could the Eye comprehend a direction that was no direction at all?

“Alright then, I’ll bite.” He lit his pipe despite the wind. Elias’s eyes reflected the amber glow of sparks. Peter took a deep, long drag, and blew out a neat plume. “What’s it like, to be the only one alive who knows the ocean? Is it lonely, Elias?”

Elias had plucked his pipe out of his hand and kissed him. There was nothing else in the world but the feel of him, sharp with that sublime terror of not being the stronghold you thought you were. When Peter saw him off again in London, content that he hadn’t budged an inch, he knew the same fear had visited Elias. That voyage had been the point of no return. The first of many mistakes.

“Yes,” Elias answered in his cell, with the same exact tone he had used when Peter had just appeared before him. 

Peter covered Elias’s hand with his, turning it so that he could kiss his knuckles. An old gesture. A meaningless one. He slid the ring on his finger.

“This is the ring you bought for the first proposal,” Elias noted. Peter got up to sit next to him, watching Elias look at the diamond on the silver band.

“And the last one, I hope.”

“Don’t you wish. You’ll do something to warrant another divorce, I’m sure.”

“When will you be done with me, then?”

Peter meant the question to be taken lightly, a funny little inside joke they’d shared for the better part of a century, another line in the cute little send-off he wanted this visit to be. Elias, however, was not willing to follow the script. His gaze hardened. He put his hand beside him on the mattress, out of Peter’s sight. The other one, the one without the ring, forced Peter to look right into his eyes.

“When I have to take your secrets from you by force,” he said, his voice soft enough to split an ocean. “Last chance, Peter Lukas.”

Something about the power of Beholding must have imbued Elias’s eyes with all the cold force of a glacier. Still, he spoke without compulsion. Peter thought he no longer needed to state his case. Elias knew, by now, that Peter did not believe in talking about things he did not find relevant; that he sought no relief for the wounds that had never bled; that if knowing anything was so important to Elias, he needn’t bother with the whole song and dance. _Take it,_ Peter dared him. Elias never did.

A jail cell, a room in Moorland House, the deck of the _Tundra_ , a thousand other places—none of them made any difference. They were still the spaces where Peter and Elias existed, within each other’s vicinity but never together. And thank Forsaken for that. So, once again, Peter opened his mouth. 

“What, do you want me to make a statement? Alright, then.” He adopted the voice he’d heard Gertrude Robinson put on in the recordings Elias had played for him, back when Peter had tried to convince him that she was dangerous and Elias had insisted that he Knew better. “Statement of Peter Lukas, captain of the _Tundra._ Statement given by subject. I love you.”

“I knew _that.”_

“Well, I would hope so,” Peter said, “husband.”

“Fiancé. We’re not wedded just yet, Peter.”

“Isn’t anyone licensed in this prison?”

“Oh, alright. I see you’re as impatient as ever.”

“We’re both _very_ busy, aren’t we? I have to return to the Institute. So many things to oversee!”

“Somehow I think they’re doing just fine without you.”

Just like that, they were back on familiar ground. Elias threatened someone into officiating and someone else into becoming a witness; Peter blew the ink on the marriage certificate until it dried. Then Elias blackmailed the warden into bringing them some wine, and soon Peter found himself looking up into Elias’s eyes from where he was sinking into the too-soft mattress.

Elias tore him apart. 

They’d had decades to know their ways around each other’s bodies, and usually Elias was quite good at picking which memories he would use on any given day. This time he seemed determined to use all of them. He bit and sucked lilac bruises into every bit of flesh he knew could push helpless little sounds from Peter’s mouth; he exerted relentless control over the pressure he put on Peter’s skin; he kissed with teeth and licked the blood.

Hours after, when he woke to the familiar sight of Elias watching him, Peter tried to map the slant of his mouth to his previous memories. This soon proved impossible, despite the fact that he carried Elias with him; it would be a damning trait, if he didn’t know just how to dull the ache and color every mental photograph with it.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked, and Elias smiled. It wasn’t one of his smug half-smirks. He smiled, guileless and open, like he had done in a garden of roses forever ago, before the many funerals and all the times they’d failed to fit together.

“Oh, now you want to know.” He sounded too fond, like he wanted to make Peter flee. “I’m sad, Peter. This is what it looks like.”

Peter left his husband in his jail cell. He thought about what was to come.

It was a win-win. Either he’d feel nothing but triumph, which would be quite straightforward in terms of tribute, or the loss would hollow him out so completely that he would never understand anything else ever again. No matter how he ended up feeling about the completion of his plan, the fog would still thicken. 

A little something for The Lonely, Peter thought as he walked back to the Institute. The word _martyr_ had come from the ancient Greek word for _witness._ Perhaps one of them fit the bill. Perhaps both of them did.

  
  


* * *

  
  


There were two kinds of knowledge you could have about a person: the kind that came from observation—being exposed to them for long stretches of time or in particular situations, so you knew just how they reacted to certain events or how they operated more generally—and the kind that was given freely by the person in question.

Peter gave nothing away of his own free will. If the Archivist came for him in The Lonely and tore every hollow history out of him, Peter would still take his war story to the grave. If Elias wanted to send someone else to rip from him what he could never bring himself to take, he would still find something missing among his winnings, one last wager lost within a wager he won. 

That wasn’t quite right, was it? Of course Elias already knew Peter’s war story, already knew that it wasn't a chronicle of justice, glory, or faith. He knew exactly what kind of tale it was; he was the one who wrote it.

**Author's Note:**

>  **me:** lonelyeyes is a ship made up of terrible men who are terrible for each other and everyone else. they shouldn't have a good ending. i want them destroyed. i want them fucked UP  
>  **season 4 finale:** [happens]  
>  **me:** [pikachu face meme]
> 
> I wrote this while listening to exile by taylor swift ft. bon iver on repeat. It made me really sad. 
> 
> The thing about LonelyEyes that really _gets_ me is that if they weren’t twisted and malicious servants of Fear Deities, they would complement each other _so well._ A man who wants to put distance between himself and the world and a man who wants to know absolutely everything about everyone? Their flaws fit so well together. Maybe in some other universe, they would have worked out. They would have grown into more healthy versions of themselves together. In this universe, unfortunately, they have to answer to their masters. And that’s really all there is to it, huh.
> 
> idk I feel like there are still many other ways this could've played out though! I hope I get to explore them again!


End file.
